Saturday, August 26, 2017

Hi
lovelies! It gives me great pleasure
today to host Cassandra Page and her new book, “False Awakening”!

Be
sure to make it to the end of this post to enter to win exciting prizes like a
$20 Amazon Gift Card or ONE of FIVE Ebooks of “Lucid Dreaming,”
Book One in the Lucid Dreaming Book Series!!
See below for more details. Also,
come back daily to interact with Cassandra and to increase your chances of
winning!

Thanks for stopping
by! Wishing you lots of luck in this
fabulous giveaway!

Melaina, half-human dream therapist, just wants her life to return to normal. Yes, her Oneiroi father is in prison and, yes, the place she worked burned down, but she has a cute boyfriend and a new house. She beat the bad guy. She’s earned a break. Right?
Unfortunately for Melaina, people are still getting possessed by nightmare spirits; the police are investigating her past; and the bad guy’s brother, the Morpheus himself, is coming to town to demand answers. When a deranged ex-nurse checks himself out of hospital on the same day her cousin runs away from home, Melaina is dragged into a fight not just for her life but for her soul.

Usually when I stepped into someone’s dreams just after they’d fallen asleep, I didn’t arrive in an active dream so much as in a place of significance in their subconscious. The kind of place they’d have recurring dreams about. As a lucid dreamer, I didn’t have true recurring dreams—deliberately conjuring dreams of my favourite places didn’t count. But I was familiar with the concept. Jen had told me that, usually, those dreams she remembered contained elements of her family home. Brad often dreamed of his grandparents’ house, where he’d spent a lot of time as a child.

That was why, when I appeared in a brightly lit department store, I raised my eyebrows. Huh. First job, maybe? I stood in an aisle full of bags of confectionary: liquorice sticks, mixed lollies, chocolate drops. But everything was slightly off. When I focused on a rustling purple and yellow packet, trying to make out the brand name, the logo slid away from my gaze as if it didn’t want to be nailed down. Price tags were illegible: smeared or written in gibberish characters. And when I looked between the packages I didn’t see a backboard filled with mounting holes but sheer, impenetrable darkness.
The darkness gaped back at me.

With goosebumps shivering along the length of my forearms, I took a moment to prepare myself, sparing a thought and a shred of energy to conjure a set of trusty motorcycle leathers. I didn’t have any such thing in the real world, but in dreams I’d found they served quite well as armour against the barbs on a blight’s tentacles. A clear-faced, round helmet made me feel like an idiot but protected my eyes. I didn’t know for certain that there was a blight here, but something was definitely not right. Even if it was just a creepy manifestation of Daniel’s subconscious—even if he was indeed going crazy—it paid to be careful. Ephemera could still have teeth.

I crept towards the end of the aisle, leather squeaking faintly as I listened for the telltale bubbling hiss of a blight. Peering past a stand of round-bellied plastic animals stuffed with jellybeans, I saw a row of unattended registers to my left. To my right, clothes swayed in a breeze I couldn’t feel. In front of me was the store’s main entrance: the roller shutter was down, allowing only a vague impression of a darkened mall beyond.

Deserted apartment stores were bloody creepy. Even ones with the lights on. Still, this didn’t look like a place a blight had trashed. Brad’s had shredded the surface of his dream, tearing holes in walls and coating everything with a mess that would do a slimy Ghostbusters spectre proud. This store was creepy, sure, but trashed? No.

Like my thought made it happen, a corner of the store went dark as one fluorescent light, then another, went out with a pop and a tinkle of glass on tile. “What the…?” I whispered, looking up.

That was when I spotted the blight.

It hung upside down from the ceiling, somewhere above the menswear section, like a deranged bat a few feet wide and made of smog. Its tentacles were jammed deep into the rectangular ceiling tiles; the tiles themselves were slick with an oily coating of blight ichor that dripped downwards, spattering across a garish display of novelty ties that hurt my eyes.

Good morning Cassandra!
Welcome to Fabulous and Brunette!
We are thrilled to have you here and can’t wait to learn more about you
and your new book series, “Lucid Dreaming.”

Can you tell us a little about your Lucid Dreaming series?

The books tell the story of
Melaina Armstrong, who is half human and half Oneiroi, or dream spirit. That
had always been impossible, for rather obvious anatomical reasons; her birth
caused a significant amount of consternation and raised a significant amount of
interest—not all of it from benign quarters.

After discovering and
defeating the individual targeting her in the first book, poor Melaina just
wants to get her life back to what passes for normal in her world. Of course,
things are never that easy.

Tell us a bit more about Melaina.

Melaina appeared in my head
one day, almost wholesale, as I was driving home after work. She came stomping
out of my subconscious complete with steel-capped boots and a nose piercing. I
loved her instantly, and put my fantasy novel plans aside to tell her story
instead. She is a university drop-out, a dream therapist and a fierce friend
and daughter. I’m going to miss her.

Does that mean you’re not planning any more books in the series?

Not at this stage;
Melaina’s story was always intended to be a duology. I have four or five other
stories percolating away in the back of my brain, each of them clamouring to be
told next. But I might be tempted to revisit her again down the track. I’ll
never say never!

What is the favourite part of your writing process?

Finishing the first draft?
I suppose that’s a bit of a cheat answer, so if I can’t say that then it’d have
to be editing. Having something to shape and hone is so much fun, and comes
much more easily to me since I’m also an editor in my day job.

My second-favourite part is
writing the last few chapters of a book. I’ve drafted six novels now, and it’s
always such a heady rush, seeing all the plot threads come together and the
plot accelerate. Also, usually by that point I’m doing mean things to my
characters, which is also fun (for me)!

Are all your books set in Australia?

All five of my urban
fantasy novels are—although part of the third book in my young adult trilogy,
Isla’s Inheritance, also has a handful of scenes set in London and Edinburgh.
I’ve considered setting a book entirely overseas, but there are several reasons
I haven’t. One is that I’ve only ever been on one overseas holiday (to Scotland
and Spain), and I didn’t think I could fake it. Another is that I’m acutely
aware that I write in Australian English. Readers would be onto me faster than
I could say “hey, mate”.

Besides, I love Australia
and thought there wasn’t enough supernatural fiction set here, so I decided to
put my money where my mouth is!

Thank you so much for
spending time with Fabulous and Brunette readers and sharing your exciting new
book series with us! We wish you all the
best on your book tour!

AUTHOR BIO:

Cassandra Page is a mother, author, editor and geek. She lives in Canberra, Australia’s bush capital, with her son and two Cairn Terriers. She has a serious coffee addiction and a tattoo of a cat — despite being allergic to cats. She has loved to read since primary school, when the library was her refuge, and loves many genres — although urban fantasy is her favourite. When she’s not reading or writing, she engages in geekery, from Doctor Who to AD&D. Because who said you need to grow up?

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This
contest is sponsored by a third party. Fabulous
and Brunette is a registered host of Xpresso Book Tours. Prizes are given away by the sponsors and not
Fabulous and Brunette. The featured author
and Xpresso Book Tours are solely responsible for the giveaway prize.